Look at this! The Beloved is drunk, His hair is messed up,
His clothes are torn and it looks like He's not had a bath in days!
Late last night, at midnight, the Beloved came this way to my bed-
Holding a jug of wine.
He whispered in my ear: "O poor lover,
Are you awake or are you asleep?"
I said; "Whatever you have put into my cup I have drunk without question.
I have been faithful and have never denied my love of wine."
Even though I stay up late at night, and wait,
This drinking has been my fate.
So, go away, preacher and leave me alone.
Stop giving me hell for drinking only dregs - it's all I can afford.
Everything the Beloved has poured into our cups, we've tried;
Whether it's the wino's brand or the Elixir of Life.
Like the laughter from a cup of wine or the braid of the Beloved's hair,
Hafiz has had a life that is joyous and then has come untied.
(Look At This, translation by Thomas Rain Crowe)
This is not a poem about an alcoholic and his jug of wine but about a love affair with God. Hafiz is a true Sufi, beyond dogma, for his 'religion' is simply the love of God and the expression of that love.
Hafiz despised false Sufis who prided themselves on their rags or those who acted holy in the market place. When Hafiz says: "So go away preacher and leave me alone" he is showing that he is not fooled by the outer forms of religion and cares only for the essence: a passionate relationship between man and God, lover and beloved.
Hafiz was born in Shiraz around the early fourteenth century; with the name Khwaja Shamsuddin Muhammad. After the death of his father he was forced to leave school and support the family, working in a drapery shop and bakery. By the age of twenty one he had taught himself mathematics, astronomy and other sciences and he was fluent in Arabic and Turkish.
According to legend, Hafiz fell in love with a woman called Shakh-i-Nabat. Obsessed with her beauty, he couldn't eat or sleep. He composed poems about her but his desire went unrequited, for she was engaged to the Prince of Shiraz.
In a desperate attempt to win her, Hafiz went to the tomb of a great Sufi master who had promised, before dying, that anyone who could stay awake for 40 consecutive nights at his tomb would be granted the gift of poetry, immortality and his heart's desire.
After 40 nights the angel Gabriel came to Hafiz, offered him a cup containing the Water of Immortality and asked him to express his heart's desire. Astonished by the beauty of the angel, Hafiz forgot Shakh-i-Nabat and said: "I want God."
The opening of this poem is dramatic. "Look at this!" Hafiz begins in an easy, colloquial tone, addressing the reader like a friend or neighbour. What he has to say is surprising - the Beloved is drunk. And then he goes on to add that God's hair is disheveled, his clothes torn and "it looks like He's not had a bath in days."
This is not the solemnity we expect when speaking of Divinity. By picturing God as drunk and disheveled, Hafiz's attitude may look, initially, irreverent. What I believe Hafiz is doing is juxtaposing the mundane (drinking, torn clothes, the bed, the cup) and the sublime (God's infinity and intangibility) to surprise the reader out of fixed beliefs, dogma, and formal rituals of worship.
In a modern sense, he creates in the Beloved the image of one who is low in society (like a beggar who hasn't washed in days) and thus portrays the Beloved as someone meek and humble.
Between Hafiz the lover and God the Beloved, worship is not a stagnant formality but alive in each moment.
When the Beloved comes to the bed of Hafiz, holding a jug of wine, he is, metaphorically, holding Divine Love. The Sufi Master Poets often compared love with wine. Both love and wine intoxicate. But while wine causes self forgetfulness, love leads to self realisation.
Meher Baba in his book The Everything and The Nothing, says, "The behaviour of the drunkard and the lover are similiar; each disregards the world's standards of conduct and each is indifferent to the opinion of the world. But there are worlds of difference between the course and the goal of the two; the one leads to subterranean darkness and denial; the other gives wings to the soul for its' flight to freedom."
In the poem, the Beloved asks Hafiz to wake up and remember his true self. He raises the critical question: are you awake or asleep?
This is a question we can all ask ourselves - are we sleepwalking through life, sometimes waking only when shocked into awareness by a momentous event?
Meditation teachers, Houman Emami and Aziz Kristof, say that only those who sharpen self-awareness and come to rest in the heart and being, are whole and awake. We need to clear the dust from the mirror of the heart (to borrow a metaphor from Rumi.)
They suggest that we shift our attention from the experience to the experiencer. By drawing attention back from the world of objects to the subject at the centre of consciousness, from the movie of our lives to the projector, there is a subtle yet radical change in perception. The external world remains the same but the perceiver is present.
Hafiz surrenders to God and to life itself, tasting every experience his soul is given. His surrender to God, his "yes" to life, is so trusting, so complete that it does not deny or split off any part of the whole.
"Everything the Beloved has poured into our cups, we've tried;
Whether it was the wino's brand or the Elixir of Life."
All Hafiz knows is that he loves wine (the Beloved's grace) and he is resigned to intoxication.("This drinking has been my fate.") His religion is simply love of the One to whom he belongs.
The final couplet is quiet but there is an undertone of shock:
"Like the laughter from a cup of wine or the braid of the Beloved's hair,
Hafiz has had a life that is joyous and then has come untied."
The final word "untied" resonates with ambiguity. On one level, it could refer to the braid of the Beloved's hair, loosened because God is beyond form. On another level, it implies spiritual liberation. The constraints of limiting beliefs give way to the freedom of awakening.
With either interpretation, the word "untied" suggests complete surrender to a larger wisdom. Hafiz' path to surrender is through a joyous life. His is not a path which denies life or seeks to escape from the earth. It includes the mundane and ultimately transcends it.